Abstract:

Although spreadsheets can be argued to be the most
widely-used visual programming languages (VPLs) today,
most are very limited compared to other VPLs,
supporting only p few built-in types and offering only
primitive support for code reuse. The inheritance
mechanisms of object-oriented programming might seem
to offer help for the latter problem, but incorporating
these mechanisms in a traditional way would introduce
concepts foreign to spreadsheets, such as message
passing. In this paper, we present similarity inheritance, a
new approach to inheritance that is suitable for seamless
integration into the spreadsheet paradigm. We first
explain the model independently of any implementation,
and then present a prototype implementation in the
research spreadsheet VPL Forms/3. We show that
bringing inheritance functionality to the spreadsheet
paradigm can be done using the widely-understood idea of
copy/paste. Further, we show why the approach requires
the presence of a live, visual environment.